Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 785
provide us with a set of stock explanations which underlie our predisposition to
interpret reality in the ways that we do. 9
In the hagiography of the late sixth century, we are dealing with just this.
There is hardly an incident connected with the holy, from Tours to Amida
(modern Diyarbekir, eastern Turkey), which is not placed within a narrative
framework whose very banality and strong sense of déjà vu serves to
make it seem utterly matter-of-fact – that this is how the holy works, and
in no other way.
It is important to have lingered over the nature of the sources that the historian
uses in approaching the holy man. They give the impression that the
‘holy man’ existed largely in the eye of the believer. This, of course, was not
the whole story. Contemporaries believed that sanctity was achieved
through ascetic labour, through humility and through the grace of God,
according to long traditions of spiritual guidance, of which we have more
abundant evidence for this period, the golden age of Christian ascetic
wisdom, than that provided by the vivid Lives of the saints, which form the
basis of modern studies of late antique hagiography. Yet, reassuring – even
infectious – though the undemonstrative sanctity of many Christian men
and women might be to their fellow believers, contemporaries wanted
something more from a holy man. Even though he might be careful always
to present himself as no more than one humble ‘servant of God’ among
many, in the quiet manner of a mature monastic tradition, the holy man was
frequently approached, in his own lifetime, as
a brilliant star, spreading its rays . . . an unshakeable column . . . who puts demons
to flight, who gives healing to the sick, a father to orphans, a food-supply to the
poor, a covering to the homeless . . . a source of repentance to all sinners and a
staff to the indigent. (Life of Theodore of Sykeon 2, ed. Festugière (1970) 2)
To find anything else was disappointing. A peasant who had walked in to
Ancona to visit the holy man Constantius was very surprised to be shown
a little man perched half-way up a ladder, busily lighting the lamps of the
shrine. He had, of course, expected to find a grandis homo, a Big Man (Greg.
Dial. i.5.5).
Certainly, the holy man came to be seen as such in retrospect. He was
almost invariably presented in this manner by those who had developed a
strong interest in his reputation – most often by disciples connected with a
monastic establishment that had grown perilously large in the lifetime of the
saint, and that faced a recession of gifts and visitors once the glory of his
living presence had departed. The Syriac Panegyric on Symeon Stylites
(396–459) was an oratorical performance, designed for the annual gathering
9 Fentress and Wickham (1992) 51.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008